No, Blade Runner 2049 is not sexist. Really

Tons of reviews all over the internet are speaking wonders of Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017). I'm not going to write yet another review saying you should all go watch it but, just so you know, it's visually the best thing I've seen in years (I went to an IMAX, do the same if you can), the actors are fantastic, the characters they portray are even better and, except for a couple of considerable loopholes in the plot -that I'm not sure Villeneuve didn't leave there on purpose-, the storyline is also really nice.

Do you know what other thing you can find tons of on the internet? Articles claiming that the film is sexist.

So tedious. So tiring.

Buy hey, I'm not giving up; in an attempt to get the world to understand that sometimes in life there can be someone somewhere who does something for a reason other than being a misogynistic jerk, I'm going to explain why, in my humble and obviously right opinion, the mentioned title does not reveal any kind of disdain towards women.

STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW

For those who don't know anything about me,

a) I'm a woman

b) I loathe modern feminism with passion

I say "modern" because I do deeply respect activists who fight to make forced marriages illegal, those who lead campaigns to raise awareness about how scarily normal it is to rape women in some countries and in general anybody who will happily throw heavy objects at those special people who say that childless women are not fulfilling their duty in life and that "they are incomplete". But those girls who will get angry at men holding doors for them because "why do you think I need a man's help for everything" and in general women who will use their gender to escape any sense of responsibility (see "I didn't get the promotion because I'm a woman and not because I haven't been productive since 1992" or "my movie won't get famous because I'm a female director and not at all because it is so boring every time I watch it I want to kill myself"), those I can't freaking stand.

END OF THE STUFF YOU NEED TO KNOW

For this exercise I'm going to use an article from The Guardian in which Anna Smith (no clue about who she was until now, but whatever, hi Anna) explains what she considers to be the multiple ways in which Villeneuve's latest work is sexist.

The less you know about what happens in the story, the better, so if you haven't seen it yet I recommend you stop reading. In case you still want to keep going, I will write SPOILER tags and change the text to white where appropriate so you can't see the content at first glance. Just select the paragraph in order to be able to read it.

This story takes place in the universe that Ridley Scott created in 1982 for Blade Runner, in which human-like beings called replicants are manufactured in order to be sent to other planets with colonisation purposes. These beings decide one day that they have been created with a ridiculously short lifespan, get angry about it and start killing people. Which makes sense, if you ask me. In 2049 K (Ryan Gosling) is a new model and his job as a Blade Runner is to find and retire the older androids that were not built to obey, which, given how similar replicants and humans are, is basically being a hitman. This said:

Joi

The one element that is easy to read as sexist here is Ana de Armas' character Joi, who is a software designed to behave as a sexy, loving girlfriend. Her duties include waiting for her man at home while cooking dinner, so you may imagine how someone who is determined to find discriminatory hints everywhere will see here a golden opportunity. Indeed, Anna Smith says:

"How are we supposed to admire a hero whose key relationship is with a woman of his own creation who will submit to his every demand and can be switched on and off as he pleases?"

Dearest Anna, as it turns out, here our darling K is the loneliest person in the entire world; he is an outcast and nobody loves him, basically because he is not only a replicant, which is bad enough in the depicted society, but also a Blade Runner, so not even other replicants want him -or this is what I understood. It's kinda hard to get every detail in this movie, to be honest-. Well, this extreme loneliness is only reinforced when you learn that if this guy wants to get a girlfriend he has to buy one. So Joi's lack of free will is not so much a decorative element left there to get boys dreaming of a programmable wife as it is just part of Gosling's character.

Or maybe not. God knows what Villeneuve and his screenwriter were thinking when they created all this stuff. Anyway, I do find K's personality easier to understand thanks to Joi.

Lieutenant Joshi

K's boss, who is by the way quite scary, is brought to life by Robin Wright and is also mentioned in Smith's article:

"Robin Wright is terrific but underused as K’s slick, strong, black-clad boss, Lieutenant Joshi [...] Meanwhile Wright’s Joshi appears attracted to K, but she is not permitted to use him for her sexual pleasure. Where is her holographic lover, her Joi?"

Out of all the wonderful supporting characters we can find in this production, Joshi is, to my mind, the one that appears just as much as she should. The issue here is that there is no rational way to defend that there is any kind of hidden misogyny in this role -she is in charge of at least one man (K), we never get to know who her bosses are and she looks like she is about to shoot you in the face any minute now-, and underuse is the wildcard of complaints, since there is no objective way of measuring whether a member of the cast has been on the screen for an acceptable amount of time. Therefore, unless a supporting actress is virtually a co-protagonist, it's always an option to say that she is being underused. Obviously what we need to do to avoid this problem is to get every main character to be a woman, use women for all the supporting roles as well and maybe get every extra to be female, just to be safe.

About the holographic lover, I may be wrong but I don't see how the audience would be interested in whatever this lady does at home. I mean, I think it makes sense to show way more details of the main star's private life than of anybody else's; Joshi may have a dude-Joi in her living-room, or a husband or a girlfriend or a harem, who cares. I don't see the point in adding scenes showing a minor role's personal life just so ultra-feminists don't feel left out. Not to mention that Joshi's strength only gets more obvious thanks to the lack of any romantic relationship in her life.

Mariette

Mackenzie Davis, whose popularity seems to be on the grow lately, plays a clever prostitute named Mariette, who interacts with K on a couple of ocassions:

"Mackenzie Davis’s Mariette shows initial promise as a strong character who can give as good as she gets, but she is also a sex worker SPOILER who is literally used as a puppet. END OF SPOILER "

Leaving aside how is it that Miss Davis sleeping with men in exchange of money is troubling but Gosling executing people for a living seems to be just fine,

a) I don't see how having their office at a brothel is going to make a character any less valid

b) The universe depicted shows replicants as second-class citizens who have to do whatever they can to survive, so it's not like we have a crazy amount of options here (another replicant makes a living out of growing worms. Just so you understand the level of fanciness here). On the other hand, these people are made with the purpose of covering specific social needs (meaning they are basically slaves), so the creation of sex workers makes quite a lot of sense

c) Mariette is an extraordinarily strong woman who has a great ability to adapt and survive, and I can't think of a  better job than prostitution to imply that someone is capable of keeping moving forward regardless the cost. So, again, this girl's job makes her character more complete

SPOILER

d) "who is literally used as a puppet" is referring to a scene in which she has sex with K. The thing is that having these two sleeping together is literally the only thing that justifies this girl's presence in the film. Her actual mission is to get K to carry a GPS with him so that creepy replicant army can follow him around. In order for this to be possible, Mariette needs to catch him in a vulnerable moment, which happens the morning following the night they spend together. For this moment to happen, she needs to be a prostitute because K is in love with Joi and therefore emotionally unavailable, so the only way to get to him is by providing the only thing Joi cannot give him: physical contact. This woman's job was not open to many possibilities

END OF SPOILER

The problem I see with this is that a role that has a set of perfectly valid characteristics and that helps develop the plot in the end gets reduced to being someone who works in the sex industry. And I find that approach just useless.

Luv

Luv (utterly fantastic Sylvia Hoeks) is a replicant who works for Wallace (Jared Letto, owner of the company that manufactures the new model of replicants); she spends half the movie beating people up and looks like a nutjob who will probably kill you in your sleep. She is just terrifying and one of the best things in the film. About her:

"[...] Sylvia Hoeks’s icy baddie Luv is great fun, but in thrall to her male boss (sinister replicant-creator Wallace, played by Jared Leto)"

So here's the deal: Wallace barely shows up in the nearly three hours this whole thing lasts -that one is underused indeed- and Luv is taking the screen all the time -as she should because she's awesome-, so I am going to make an educated guess and say that, if the boss were a female and Luv was played by a man, Smith's article would say that sure, the boss is a girl and she's really cool, but in the end most of the minutes in front of the camera have been given to that male slave who works for her.

Are we all getting how this works? To these people's eyes there's no way of not being sexist because they will cherry-pick the details that suit them in order to form an opinion.

Sexualisation

Besides finding some kind of disdain towards women in nearly every female character, the article also mentions the sexualisation of women in general:

"Visually, sexualised images of women dominate the stunning futuristic cityscapes, from pirouetting ballerinas to giant statues of naked women in heels looming over K as he goes on his journey."

The half naked chicks part is true and useful to create an atmosphere of decadence (as the author herself mentions right after the above paragraph), but the ballerinas bit, what the hell is that about; out of all the dancing disciplines I can think of, the classic one must be the one which is sexualised the least -more like not at all, really-; ballet enhances beauty and elegance, but sexuality? Seriously? Nor are the movements erotic in any way, nor is the clothing designed to arouse anybody. And the dancers that are showed in the movie are the typical ones you have in mind, with the tutu and the pointe shoes and stuff, don't think they made them sexier in any way. Including ballet dancers in the list of "sexualised women" means that absolutely anything that includes a woman dressed in something other than a bin bag is going to be considered sexual -which, ironically, is sexist-. Which gives me yet another reason to believe this article and its associated opinion are as biased as it gets.

There are also some comments about how the film doesn't have enough racial diversity, but imaginary racism must be the one thing that I find more annoying than made up sexism, so maybe let's not get into that today.

Summing up, it's not that I believe that people are overreacting to sexism in the film industry, it's more that I think people are just making that sexism up when coming accross any product that is not led by a strong, independent woman and in which men are absolutely irrelevant. I'm afraid that before we reach actual equality between men and women we are going to have to go through a female supremacy equivalent to that gross disrespect against women that was in nearly every house of the planet just a few years back, only with the genders switched and with females playing the victim and blaming all of their issues in life to the patriarchy's oppression.

I may just hop on the bandwagon one of these days. I don't know what I'm doing taking responsibility for my own mistakes when I could be blaming it all on the men of the world.

I have yet so much to learn.

This post is a rough translation of something I wrote originally in Spanish. You can read it here.